


Ready Set Go

by ridorana



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: M/M, Post-game 5 years
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2020-03-05 08:17:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18824776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ridorana/pseuds/ridorana
Summary: Balthier waits until nightfall settles to make his move, and when he picks the lock of the inn room, he does so with the stealth of a pirate Vaan could only dream of being.How old is he now, anyway? Twenty one? Twenty two?Balthier ponders it only briefly as his hands close around the column of Vaan’s throat and he pins him to the bed beneath his weight.





	Ready Set Go

**Author's Note:**

> oh bitches! i snapped but im back

It isn’t hard to find him in this foreign port town. On this end of the continent it appears anyone would gladly sell a man’s life over for some gil, and Balthier has plenty of it to shell out for this errand. A small shake of a coinpurse is all it takes to exact Vaan’s location from a tavernmaster. "Blond. Short. Dalmascan." is all Balthier rattles off in an uncharacteristic bout of brevity. Surely, Vaan sticks out like a sore thumb in the west; in no time Balthier has his coordinates right down to a room number.

And only five hundred gil poorer for it.

Ripe with midsummer heat, Rozarria is a ruthless country, made ruthless more by her people. The characters here make Balfonheim pirates look like saints.

Balthier waits until nightfall settles to make his move, and when he picks the lock of the inn room, he does so with the stealth of a pirate Vaan could only dream of being.

How old is he now, anyway? Twenty one? Twenty two?

Balthier ponders it only briefly as his hands close around the column of Vaan’s throat and he pins him to the bed beneath his weight.

The choke he wrings from him is more out of surprise than strangled force, but beneath Balthier’s weight, Vaan still can’t move.

“If you were any other man, I would have killed you for this stunt,” Balthier grits through his teeth in the darkness. He feels the younger man’s pulse thrum like a panicked hare beneath his calloused thumbs and it causes him to smirk. It’s good to give the youth a little scare. Vaan struggles and writhes, and he puts up a decent enough fight before Balthier relents. His cough is wet and spittle lands on Balthier's cheek. When Vaan speaks, his voice is raw.

“If you were any other man, you’d’ve been dead before I even made off with it.”

Vaan turns on a lamp next to the bed while coughing still, and glares at his old mentor. He’s certainly wide awake now if he wasn’t before, his hair pillow-mussed and flesh mottled with the fading pressure of Balthier’s fingers. His chest rises and falls erratically, and he looks feral in the dim light.

“Is that so! You jest; you wouldn’t hurt a fly. I’d know, I saw it myself dragging your arse all across Ivalice.”

“Then clearly you weren’t paying attention.”

Those red marks on Vaan’s neck tempt Balthier to reacquaint his thumbs to them and press until he squeezes out a drop of respect from his once-apprentice.

“Where’s the map, you ceaseless headache of a creature?”

“Sold it to some nomads,” Vaan chirps smugly. “Well, after I got it copied. There’s an old moogle outside Eruyt with a real steady paw, she replicated it acre by acre.”

Balthier takes a long, deep breath through his nostrils, and when he speaks again his voice is terse. “Do you even know what that map lead to?”

“More than you do,” comes the reply, before he coughs again. “Betcha didn’t know it was a fake.”

“What?”

Vaan rubs his eyes. “What time is it, anyway?” he asks, as though he wants to admonish Balthier for the hour at which he chose to strangle an answer out of him.

“It’s time for you to give me some answers. You spirited away a privately commissioned lead a longtime client of mine entrusted to myself and Fran, and you’re telling me it’s a fake?”

“Yup.”

“Do you want me to strangle an explanation out of you, or would you care for the option of volunteering one?”

But Vaan only laughs, a sound deeper than the echoes of Balthier’s memory, of years before when he was but a bumbling, scrappy, sandy little thief.

“It can wait til morning. I’ll tell you everything then. In the meantime, you’re welcome for saving you and Fran the trouble. Unless you wanted to spend your summer digging for a dupe off the marshlands like a bunch of Baknamy. In that case, you can have the copy I had made.”

Through a glare, Balthier scrutinizes Vaan. "Why have a copy made of a false lead?"

"In case anyone else tries to steal the map from me."

It takes Balthier aback for a moment. He blinks once, twice, regarding Vaan with a gaze that feels foreign to him.

How old is he, again? How long has it been?

"Since when did you start thinking ahead?"

Vaan's laugh is in his eyes alone, and perhaps too, spirited away within damnably cute dimples that haven't budged in their years apart. "When you started slacking off."

Balthier hovers over Vaan still, giving him one last lingering glare that appears to do nothing as an intimidation tactic, because the Dalmascan just grins back up at him. “Oh. And tell Fran I said hi, okay?”

“You should be lucky it was I who paid you a visit; had it been her, you’d have been skewered by her arrow before you even opened your eyes.”

Vaan yawns, nonplussed. When he arches to stretch, Balthier’s eyes wander once again on the echo of his touch on Vaan’s neck, still fresh and raw. He follows the line of his neck, down to broader shoulders that shape to a man who was once a boy; a pirate where he was once a thief. A old, long-buried desire sparks within him to cover him with different marks altogether.

“You guys don’t scare me. We’re friends, remember?”

Balthier wants to give Vaan a long, stern talking to on what the meaning of friendship is among pirates, but the hour is late and Vaan is dense. Thus, Balthier leaves, not without agreeing he’d reconvene with Vaan in the morning lest he truly mount his head on a spear.

When Balthier walks back out into the deep Rozarrian night, he ponders the pirate he just encountered.

Vaan.

Rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed and full of vigor as ever, riding high on the life of a young pirate, cresting winds on wings Balthier taught him to use. It's true it's been long since he's spent any time alongside Vaan, or anyone, for that matter. As the years stretched since Ashelia's rightful rule, so did the distance between them all, scattered off at all corners of Ivalice until distance became less about the miles carved beneath the Strahl's wings and more about time carving their paths in different directions.

Yet there was one path Balthier couldn't help but cross over since the Bahamut fell. Even in a place as vast as the sky, Vaan always found him, one way or another.

Never planned, of course, always rightfully serendipitous in accord to their life as pirates; stumbling into each other at a port town here, taking on a spontaneous hunt when on repair in Rabanastre there. Spontaneous rendezvous touch-and-go's that left ripples in the wake of them like skipping stones into a fog. As Balthier walks, he does the math. It's been at least a year since he's see Vaan last.

He's grown. It's intriguing, if not annoying. Nay, it's both, actually. Were he not such an overwhelmingly bloody nuisance, Balthier would have bedded him by now, seven times over, at least, or some multiple of seven to make it worth the trouble. Seeing as he likely won’t ever _stop_ being a bloody nuisance, Balthier realizes he’ll either need to let go of that nearly vintage wet dream or learn to make a compromise. Vaan is tempting in such a way that it might be worth it. Worth more, at least, than five hundred gil.

By the time he decides to find out that next morning, however, Vaan’s already gone from the inn. A note is all that's left on the bedside table next to a map. Balthier unfurls it to chickatrice-scritch excuse for penmanship, spelling out what must be another grand, cosmic joke in the dramedy of his life.

 _“something more valuable–the cache of y’narro._  
_(this one’s the real one! I promise!)_  
_last one to it’s a rotten egg_

_ready, set, go"_


End file.
